Tag: mantis-fly

Even after a couple of years photographing bugs in my garden I come across insects which are quite new to me. I got another one just a couple of days ago, a mantis-fly:

A mantis-fly hanging beneath a frangipani leaf

The photo makes it look very much like a praying mantis but in real life you would notice that is is tiny compared to an ordinary green mantis like this. In fact, it is only 10-12mm long. A baby praying mantis could be this small but wouldn’t have wings – see this little brown one, for instance.

The mantis-fly does use the same hunting strategy as praying mantises – sit and wait, then grab with those over-developed front legs – but it is not closely related to them. Rather, it is a cousin of lacewings and ant-lions, a family within the order of Neuroptera. (Once again I will use an index page on Graeme’s Insects of Townsville site to illustrate the relationship.) There is a nice introduction to Neuroptera here, on the Queensland Museum website. There are 45 Australian species of Mantispidae and I’m not sure which one mine belongs to.

Insects of Townsville

Many of my older posts link to Graeme Cocks’ excellent “Insects of Townsville.” Late in 2016 it moved to http://kooka.info/orders.html. The new site is still incomplete but is your best hope of finding the information or photo.